One of my ironclad rules of reporting in the Middle East is that sometimes you need to rereport a story to see things even more clearly than you did earlier. I’m having that experience with the Iran-Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war, which could soon draw in the United States. It could not be more clear now that, while Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel on Oct. 7 was triggered in part by reckless Israeli settlement expansions, brutal treatment of Palestinian prisoners and encroachments on Muslim religious sites in Jerusalem, the terrorist assault was also part of a broader Iranian campaign to drive America out of the Middle East and America’s Arab and Israeli allies into a corner — before they could corner Iran.
Which is why if the current tit-for-tat conflict between Israel and Iran and Iran’s proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis) escalates into a full-scale war — one that Israel could not fight for very long alone — President Biden could face the most fateful decision of his presidency: whether to go to war with Iran, alongside Israel, and take out Tehran’s nuclear program, which is the keystone of Iran’s strategic network in the region. Iran has been building that network to supplant America as the most powerful force in the Middle East and to bleed Israel to death by a thousand cuts inflicted by its proxies.
But America must always be wary about what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is up to. As a former Israeli diplomat, Alon Pinkas, observed in Haaretz on Thursday, one has to wonder why Netanyahu chose now to assassinate the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran — in the middle of delicate hostage talks.
Was it just because it could (lord knows Haniyeh had a lot of Israeli blood on his hands), or was Israel “deliberately provoking escalation in the hope that a conflagration with Iran will drag the United States into the conflict, further distancing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from the debacle of Oct. 7 — a calamity that to this day he has not been held accountable for.”
In Netanyahu’s nearly 17 years in power, Bibi has both aided and undermined American interests in the region. I would not trust Netanyahu for a second to put U.S. interests ahead of his own political survival needs — since he won’t even put Israel’s interests ahead of them.
But honesty also requires me to acknowledge that some things are true even if Netanyahu believes them. And one of those things is that Iran is the biggest indigenous imperial power in the Middle East, and through its proxies it has been dominating the politics of millions of Arabs living in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza, Iraq and Yemen — dragging their citizens into wars with Israel that few of them have any interest in. No leader in any of these Arab states today can make decisions hostile to Iran’s interests without fear of being killed.
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